Sometimes I wonder how the Chinese felt about the blatant IP theft by the British ages ago. I however am grateful for the fact that tea became more accessible due to that. We wouldn't have Assam and Darjeeling otherwise.
"The thing is that they remember all those things while people in the West are oblivious to them."
You are so right. Opium wars is major part of history books.
Every educated Chinese( or not so educated ones) knows this part of history. There is this "they wronged us" mindset right or wrong. A lot of conflicts come from this.
It's not that we're oblivious to them, we just haven't been trained to feel personally angry about it. I learned about the Opium Wars in my 9th-grade world history class in US public school, nearly a quarter-century ago, and it was treated as a pivotal moment in Chinese history. It's very difficult to avoid being reminded about it regularly if you read news about modern Chinese politics and foreign affairs.
That's very far from the mark.
Tea was engineered by the Chinese for thousands of years. Initially it was drunk for its stimulating qualities, as some sort of medicine. If you pluck tea leaves and try to make tea yourself the result will be absolutely unpalatable. Through hundreds of years of growing it, the Chinese figured out rather non-intuitive tricks to make it taste better and better.
The British tried to grow their own tea unsuccessfully for decades. In the end Robert Fortune illegally brought a group of trained Chinese tea workers as well as stolen seedlings to the East India plantations in India.
